Footage shows the mother snow leopard, or ounce, padding over a grassy area surrounded by rocks and followed by her four well-grown cubs.

As the mother disappears from view, two of the youngsters remain behind, sniffing the ground and looking straight into the night-vision camera lens.

Snow leopards have long been believed to give birth to as many as five offspring on rare occasions, although the most luckiest sightings have been of two cubs.

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Snow leopards live in incredibly harsh environments

The historic film was brought down from the mountains this week, leaving researchers astounded with the first confirmed proof that snow leopards can produce quadruplets was downloaded.

The sighting of a mother with quadruplet cubs is astonishing

Rebecca May

To put the footage in context, the BBC listed its Planet Earth 2 footage of snow leopards as one of the the highlights of the recent series.

Four snow leopards were filmed, with intense scenes of fighting and mating. Producers had embarked on three trips over successive years to Ladakh, Northern Indian, one of the best places to see the leopards but where they only exist in a density of four animals for every 100 square kilometres.

WWF-UK's Snow Leopard programme lead Rebecca May explained the delight felt by conservationists after the new footage emerged.

“The astonishing sighting of a mother with quadruplet cubs seen in the video captures the beauty of these mystical creatures,” she said.

“With between 4,000 and 6,500 snow leopards estimated to be living in the wild, to see footage of snow leopards is truly astounding, especially one with four cubs.

“Living in an incredibly harsh landscape these hardy cats are threatened by poaching, human wildlife conflict and loss of living space.

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Snow leopards have long been believed to give birth to as many as five offspring

“In fact, WWF and TRAFFIC released a report earlier this year which showed that hundreds of snow leopards are killed each year. It is vital that governments, communities and organisations across all 12 snow leopard range countries, take action to halt human-wildlife conflict, as well as poaching and trade in snow leopard parts.”

The WWF-TRAFFIC report “An Ounce of Prevention: Snow Leopard Crime Revisited” estimated that between 221-450 snow leopards have been poached annually since 2008: a minimum of four per week but this number could be substantially higher since many killings in remote areas go undetected.

It also showed that killing snow leopards for their silvery dappled coats – a hunter can secure a year’s wages by selling one leopard pelt – accounts for less deaths than from human conflict.

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Studying seizure records, market surveys and conducting first hand interviews allowed researchers to produce the first quantitative estimates of the scale of snow leopard poaching and trafficking since 2003.

The report found the majority of snow leopards are killed in retaliation for attacks on livestock (55 per cent) or by non-targeted methods, such as snares (18 per cent), with only 21 percent of snow leopards poached specifically for the illegal trade in their pelts and products.

Yet snow leopards killed in retaliation for killing livestock are still being flayed and up to 219 pelts are illegally traded each year.

More than 90 percent of the reported snow leopard poaching, says the report, occurred in five range countries: China, Mongolia, Pakistan, India and Tajikistan.

China and Russia were most frequently identified as destinations for animals poached in other countries, while Afghanistan has also been a major illegal market for snow leopard furs over the past decade.